Interpretable Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension with Query-driven Scene Graphs

Fuente: arXiv
Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wu, Yike, Bolucu, Necva, Wan, Stephen, Wang, Dadong, Xia, Jiahao, Zhang, Jian
Format: Preprint
Published: 2026
Subjects:
Online Access:
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866911545230884864
author Wu, Yike
Bolucu, Necva
Wan, Stephen
Wang, Dadong
Xia, Jiahao
Zhang, Jian
author_facet Wu, Yike
Bolucu, Necva
Wan, Stephen
Wang, Dadong
Xia, Jiahao
Zhang, Jian
contents Zero-shot referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to locate target objects in images given natural language queries without relying on task-specific training data, demanding strong visual understanding capabilities. Existing Vision-Language Models~(VLMs), such as CLIP, commonly address zero-shot REC by directly measuring feature similarities between textual queries and image regions. However, these methods struggle to capture fine-grained visual details and understand complex object relationships. Meanwhile, Large Language Models~(LLMs) excel at high-level semantic reasoning, their inability to directly abstract visual features into textual semantics limits their application in REC tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{SGREC}, an interpretable zero-shot REC method leveraging query-driven scene graphs as structured intermediaries. Specifically, we first employ a VLM to construct a query-driven scene graph that explicitly encodes spatial relationships, descriptive captions, and object interactions relevant to the given query. By leveraging this scene graph, we bridge the gap between low-level image regions and higher-level semantic understanding required by LLMs. Finally, an LLM infers the target object from the structured textual representation provided by the scene graph, responding with detailed explanations for its decisions that ensure interpretability in the inference process. Extensive experiments show that SGREC achieves top-1 accuracy on most zero-shot REC benchmarks, including RefCOCO val (66.78\%), RefCOCO+ testB (53.43\%), and RefCOCOg val (73.28\%), highlighting its strong visual scene understanding.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2603_25004
institution arXiv
publishDate 2026
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Interpretable Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension with Query-driven Scene Graphs
Wu, Yike
Bolucu, Necva
Wan, Stephen
Wang, Dadong
Xia, Jiahao
Zhang, Jian
Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimedia
Zero-shot referring expression comprehension (REC) aims to locate target objects in images given natural language queries without relying on task-specific training data, demanding strong visual understanding capabilities. Existing Vision-Language Models~(VLMs), such as CLIP, commonly address zero-shot REC by directly measuring feature similarities between textual queries and image regions. However, these methods struggle to capture fine-grained visual details and understand complex object relationships. Meanwhile, Large Language Models~(LLMs) excel at high-level semantic reasoning, their inability to directly abstract visual features into textual semantics limits their application in REC tasks. To overcome these limitations, we propose \textbf{SGREC}, an interpretable zero-shot REC method leveraging query-driven scene graphs as structured intermediaries. Specifically, we first employ a VLM to construct a query-driven scene graph that explicitly encodes spatial relationships, descriptive captions, and object interactions relevant to the given query. By leveraging this scene graph, we bridge the gap between low-level image regions and higher-level semantic understanding required by LLMs. Finally, an LLM infers the target object from the structured textual representation provided by the scene graph, responding with detailed explanations for its decisions that ensure interpretability in the inference process. Extensive experiments show that SGREC achieves top-1 accuracy on most zero-shot REC benchmarks, including RefCOCO val (66.78\%), RefCOCO+ testB (53.43\%), and RefCOCOg val (73.28\%), highlighting its strong visual scene understanding.
title Interpretable Zero-shot Referring Expression Comprehension with Query-driven Scene Graphs
topic Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
Multimedia
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.25004